# Time-RA: Towards Time Series Reasoning for Anomaly Diagnosis with LLM Feedback

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15066 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15066/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [MOMENT: A Family of Open Time-series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03885/) (2024)
- [The UCR Time Series Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07758/) (2018)
- [Detecting Spacecraft Anomalies Using LSTMs and Nonparametric Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04431/) (2018)
- [UltraFeedback: Boosting Language Models with Scaled AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01377/) (2023)
- [Anomaly Transformer: Time Series Anomaly Detection with Association Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02642/) (2021)
- [Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14735/) (2024)
- [PyOD: A Python Toolbox for Scalable Outlier Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01588/) (2019)
- [A Multimodal Anomaly Detector for Robot-Assisted Feeding Using an LSTM-based Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00614/) (2017)
- [Deep Time Series Models: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13278/) (2024)
- [A review on outlier/anomaly detection in time series data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04236/) (2020)
- [Time-Series Anomaly Detection Service at Microsoft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03821/) (2019)
- [Current Time Series Anomaly Detection Benchmarks are Flawed and are Creating the Illusion of Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13807/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05244/) (2022)
- [ChatTime: A Unified Multimodal Time Series Foundation Model Bridging Numerical and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11376/) (2024)
- [Time-MQA: Time Series Multi-Task Question Answering with Context Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01875/) (2025)
- [Exathlon: A Benchmark for Explainable Anomaly Detection over Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05073/) (2020)
- [RobustTAD: Robust Time Series Anomaly Detection via Decomposition and Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09545/) (2020)
- [Can LLMs Understand Time Series Anomalies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05440/) (2024)
- [Multivariate Industrial Time Series with Cyber-Attack Simulation: Fault Detection Using an LSTM-based Predictive Data Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06676/) (2016)
- [TimeX++: Learning Time-Series Explanations with Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09308/) (2024)
- [Dive into Time-Series Anomaly Detection: A Decade Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20512/) (2024)
- [TimeSeriesBench: An Industrial-Grade Benchmark for Time Series Anomaly Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10802/) (2024)
- [Explaining Time Series via Contrastive and Locally Sparse Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08552/) (2024)
- [How Can Time Series Analysis Benefit From Multiple Modalities? A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11835/) (2025)
- [An Efficient One-Class SVM for Anomaly Detection in the Internet of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11146/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [STReasoner: Empowering LLMs for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Time Series via Spatial-Aware Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03248/) (2026)
- [LLaTiSA: Towards Difficulty-Stratified Time Series Reasoning from Visual Perception to Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17295/) (2026)
- [TraceBench: Controlled Evaluation of LLM Agents for Time-Series Root-Cause Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27182/) (2026)
- [ChatAD: Reasoning-Enhanced Time-Series Anomaly Detection with Multi-Turn Instruction Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13546/) (2026)
- [Tiny but Trusted: Efficient Vision-Language Reasoning for Time-Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30344/) (2026)
- [Onnes: A Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent LLM Simulator for Cryogenic Fault Diagnosis in Quantum Computing Infrastructure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05805/) (2026)
- [EvoTS-Agent: A Self-Evolving LLM Agent for Financial Time Series Change Point Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17933/) (2026)
- [MMTA: Benchmarking Multimodal Temporal Analysis with Time Series, Text, and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17856/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has traditionally focused on binary classification and often lacks the fine-grained categorization and explanatory reasoning required for transparent decision-making. To address these limitations, we propose Time-series Reasoning for Anomaly (Time-RA), a novel task that reformulates TSAD from a discriminative into a generative, reasoning-intensive paradigm. To facilitate this, we introduce RATs40K, the first real-world large-scale multimodal benchmark with ~40,000 samples across 10 domains, integrating raw time series, textual context, and visual plots with structured reasoning annotations. Extensive benchmarking shows that while supervised fine-tuning and visual representations boost diagnostic accuracy and reasoning consistency, performance varies across complex scenarios. Notably, fine-tuned models demonstrate strong "plug-and-play" transferability, outperforming traditional baselines on unseen real-world datasets. Our work establishes a foundation for interpretable, multimodal time series analysis. All code (https://github.com/yyysjz1997/Time-RA) and the RATs40K dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Time-RA/RATs40K) are fully open-sourced to facilitate future research.